The Environment in Focus

The Environment in Focus is a weekly perspective on the issues and people changing Maryland's natural world. There's a story behind every bend of the Chesapeake Bay's 11,684 miles of shoreline, in every abandoned coal mine in the Appalachian Mountains, in every exotic beetle menacing our forests and in every loophole snuck into pollution control laws in Annapolis. Tom Pelton gives you a tour of this landscape every Wednesday at 7:46 a.m. and 5:45 p.m.

Tom Pelton is a national award-winning environmental journalist, formerly with The Baltimore Sun. He is now director of communications at the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to holding polluters and governments accountable to protect public health.

The Environment in Focus is independently owned and distributed by Environment in Focus Radio to WYPR and other stations. The program is sponsored by the Abell Foundation, which is working to enhance the quality of life in Baltimore and in Maryland. The views expressed are solely Pelton's. You can contact him at pelton.tom@gmail.com

A new twist has surfaced in a long-running saga over what would be the first wind farm built on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski, the powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, recently added language to a defense appropriation bill that would prevent the Navy from finalizing an agreement to allow two dozen 600-foot-tall wind turbines at the proposed Great Bay Wind Energy Center in Somerset County.

Allowing hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in Western Maryland would result in a high likelihood that public health would suffer, according to a report released on Monday by the University of Maryland.

Air pollution from the diesel engines and trucks used in fracking would likely cause coughs, severe headaches, burning eyes and other health problems in Garrett and Allegany counties where drilling is contemplated, according to researchers with the University’s School of Public Health.

“Crab populations are low, so Marylanders would like us to step up our enforcement efforts when it comes to crabbing violations,' said Major Jerry Kirkwood of the Maryland Natural Resource Police

A scientific survey of the Chesapeake Bay’s blue crab population earlier this year found that the numbers had fallen to the lowest levels since 2008. That was when the federal government declared the Bay an economic disaster area and allowed watermen to collect emergency relief funds.

“What we’re seeing this year is the number of adult female crabs – those female crabs that are creating the next generation – is very, very low," said Lynn Fegley, deputy director of fisheries at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. "It actually fell slightly below what we consider our safe threshold, which is why we are calling the stock depleted.”

Fegley said unusually cold temperatures this winter killed about 28 percent of the Bay’s crabs. This compounded a problem from the previous year, when unfavorable winds and ocean currents meant record low numbers of crab larvae survived.

Bad weather’s blow to the blue crabs is a reversal in what had been a great comeback story. Crab populations in the Bay more than doubled between 2008 and 2010 after Maryland and Virginia imposed some restrictions on catching female crabs and banned dredging for hibernating females in the winter.

But after a brief spike, crab populations have plunged back into the danger zone.

After more than a century of decline, the harvest of oysters from the Chesapeake Bay has quadrupled over the last four years. This increase has inspired a debate over whether more -- or fewer -- restrictions are needed on the harvest of the Bay's keystone species.

Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley's political campaigning in Iowa, a farming capital of the U.S., has sparked complaints from some environmentalists, who claim that he is pandering to the powerful farm lobby.

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4:36

The Environment In Focus Podcast 7-2-2014

Michele Merkel, co-director of the justice program at Food & Water Watch, accused O'Malley of avoiding action in his own state to regulate manure from Maryland’s huge poultry industry, which is polluting the Chesapeake BayFor example, she said, the governor in 2013 signed a law – sought by farmers and their allies -- called the “Agricultural Certainty Act.” It provides exemptions from any new pollution control regulations for farms that meet minimum requirements.

The O’Malley administration also twice delayed poultry manure regulations that would prohibit the spreading of more poultry waste on Eastern Shore fields that are already overloaded with phosphorus from chicken litter.

For example, Hance said, the state issued regulations prohibiting the spreading of manure in the winter, and required water pollution control permits for 80 percent of the large poultry farms in Maryland.

Hance said the administration may still issue the long-delayed manure management regulations to control phosphorus -- after conducting an economic impact study to determine the cost for farmers.

Sisters Leah and Audrey Rozier wrote a song to protest the proposed construction of what would be the largest incinerator in the United States near their homes in far south Baltimore.

The sisters, aged 16 and 19, want Maryland officials to stop the construction in the Fairfield neighborhood of the Energy Answers waste-to-energy plant, which would burn pulverized garbage to generate electricity.

President Obama's proposed regulations to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from coal-fired power plants have been attacked as a neo-socialist, federal power grab. Ironically, however, his "cap and trade" strategy for reducing carbon dioxide is actually a conservative and modest approach that uses a Wall Street-friendly method of reducing pollution championed by President George H.W. Bush.

The centerpiece of the Obama Administration's climate change policy -- which calls for reductions in emissions of about one percent a year over the next 16 years -- is far from radical.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center are studying Native American trash heaps full of oyster shells around the Chesapeake Bay that date to thousands of years ago.

Susan Cook-Patton, Torben Rick and colleagues recently published an article in the journal Landscape Ecology that describes how these old oyster shells enrich the soil with calcium, nitrogen and phosphorus, spurring the growth of unusual communities of wildflowers and grasses.

Nutria, also called Myocaster coypus (latin for mouse beaver), are large rodents native to South America that wreaked havoc on the Chesapeake Bay's wetlands when they were imported in the 1940's for the fur trade.

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The Environment In Focus Podcast 5-28-2014

But now nutria face their last stand on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Only a few are left after an intensive, more than decade-long trapping campaign by federal and state government agencies.

Wildlife managers have been trying to eradicate the invasive species because they eat the roots of wetlands plants. This accelerates the erosion of marshes that are important breeding grounds for fish and birds, and also work as water pollution filters that clean the Chesapeake Bay.

Biologist Bryan MacKay's new book, “A Year Across Maryland: A Week By Week Guide to Discovering Nature in the Chesapeake Region,” describes the miraculous diversity of the Mid-Atlantic's natural world.

Scientific data collected over three decades proves that upgrading sewage plants and government regulation of fisheries work to improve the Chesapeake Bay. A report by U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science documents the success of clean water and air laws in cleaning up Bay tributaries.

A few years ago, a massive bull shark was caught in a Chesapeake Bay tributary, creating quite a stir about "Jaws in the Potomac River."

The truth is, however, that sharks are far more likely to be prey than predator when they encounter people.

Overfishing of sharks up and down the East Coast has destabilized the balance of life in the Bay, with cownose rays multiplying -- and eating more oysters -- because there are few sharks left to eat the rays. (Originally aired Oct. 27, 2010)

Since Darwin's time, most scientists and school children have assumed that the singing of song birds in the spring is an almost exclusively male trait. But new research by Kevin Omland and Karan Odom of the University of Maryland Baltimore County and colleagues shows that both female and males sing in 71 percent of the surveyed song bird species around the world.

Once nearly extinct in the East, beaver populations are booming. Their comeback, however, is creating complications for storm water pollution control systems, which beavers love to dam up.

Stephanie Boyles Griffin, director of wildlife response for the Humane Society of the U.S., is convincing governments to use devices called "beaver deceivers." They foil beaver dams in a way that does not kill the animals.

Fourth generation farm owners Mary Anne and Rick Peterman are among the residents of the Eastern Shore of Maryland who would profit from a proposed 50-turbine wind farm that could be the first built on the Delmarva Peninsula.

A coal waste containment pond owned by the nation’s largest power company, Duke Energy, ruptured in February, spewing almost 40,000 tons of toxic muck into North Carolina's Dan River.

The disaster -- along with a chemical spill into a West Virginia river -- illustrate the need for strong regulatory action by EPA to protect waterways at a time the federal agency is being criticized as unnecessary. (Photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Steve Alexander)

In a new book, Frankenstein's Cat, author Emily Anthes makes the provocative argument that cloning and genetic engineering could be used as tools to help bring back endangered species and perhaps even to resurrect extinct animals.

Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley pledged to "fully fund" the state's land preservation program when he ran for office, but then diverted $693 million from the dedicated land preservation fund to help solve a budget crisis after the recession hit.

Clean energy advocates are urging the Maryland General Assembly to close a loophole in the state's renewable energy law, which allows paper mills to burn a wood waste called "black liquor" to collect millions of dollars in subsidies from electricity rate payers.